Health care information systems receive, process and output a wide variety of health care data. For example, health care information systems may work with different types of health care data including data relating to the medical history of a patient, clinical data, patient data defining the birthdate, address and other personal information of a patient, data relating to the result of various tests or procedures or the like. The health care data may be received by health care information systems from a wide variety of sources and the health care information systems may, in turn, provide output to a wide variety of recipients. For example, health care information systems may receive and provide data to various health care providers, patients, laboratories, pharmaceutical companies or the like.
The health care data may be received in a variety of different formats. For example, health care data may have different formats depending upon the source of the health care data or the type of health care data. In order to perform analytics upon the health care data and/or to display the health care data in a manner that is readily understood by an end user, the health care data may be transformed, such as by being normalized, prior to the performance of analytics or projections based upon the health care data and prior to the display of the health care data for end users. By transforming the health care data including normalizing the health care data, the variations in the health care data brought about by different formats and/or different sources may be reduced or eliminated and the health care data may be represented in a manner that is more meaningful for the end user.
The transformations applied to health care data may vary depending upon a variety of factors including the source of the health care data, the format of the health care data, the type of health care data, the purpose of the health care data or the like. By way of example, however, the transformation of health care data may include parsing the health care data received from various sources, extracting health care facts and metadata, extracting features from unstructured data and from additional features, normalizing the data, recoding the data to a different format, etc. Once transformed, the transformed data may be subject to a variety of data analytics and/or a variety of projections of the transformed data may be generated in order to provide additional information to an end user.
Over the course of time, the transformations to be applied to the health care data may change or the health care data itself may change. In these instances, the health care data may again be transformed to ensure that the analytics and projections of the data are current. However, the repeated transformation of the health care data as the health care data changes and/or as the transformations change may create inefficiencies with respect to the processing of the health care data and undesirably consume processing resources of the health care information system.
As noted above, the health care data received from different sources may be formatted in different manners. As such, a health care information system may include different transform elements in order to transform the health care data received from different sources with the transform elements configured to perform the same functions but to act on differently formatted data. For example, a first transform element may be configured to transform the health care data received from a first source, while a second transform element may be configured to transform the health care data received from the second source. The transformation that is performed by the first and second transform elements may be the same, but the first and second transform elements may need to be separately developed and maintained in order to accomplish the same type of transformation for health care data received from the different sources. This redundancy in the transform elements may also lead to inefficiencies in the development and maintenance of the transform elements of a health care information system.